Mikelius

I removed the dash at the end. Guess it was a typo

To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren’t counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol

I’m honestly… In the middle.

My home network is covered by a VPN, which means I can’t use streaming services without punching a hole for my home IP and sacrificing a little privacy - which I’m not willing to do. I’ve gone through my part and contacted providers to lemme through, without success. Even Amazon who CLEARLY knows my name and mailing address still won’t let me watch things even if I own Prime…

So yes, I pirate movies and tv shows. I’ve tried to cooperate, but if my money isn’t enough, then so be it.

Video games I no longer pirate, I’m content with Steam. I also backup all my installs on an external hard drive in the unlikely event Steam goes under or a company demands pulling a game from my profile.

This is no longer true for Nintendo. Their latest attitudes have resulted in me deleting my account and becoming a loyal pirate for Nintendo games. They literally turned me into what they’re fighting, ironic right?

I also no longer pirate general software because 98% of the software I use are FOSS, self created, or just free+offline in general. The other 2% is software I purchased because it was a lifetime permanent license and for software I felt deserved the money for support.

So yeah big tech is my main enemy. If I need something and they won’t work with me without ransoming my privacy and rights, then yeah so be it.

I’m not familiar with those two… But I’ve always been hunting for the perfect replacement.

I started with Nextcloud Deck and used it extensively until they got rid of my markdown support.

So then I tried taiga and a few others before landing on Wekan. Really great software, but the terrible API, horrible mobile support, and slow outdated UI drove me away…

Now I’m on Vikunja, which ironically doesn’t support markdown text. So I basically returned to square 1 with a better UI lol. I almost stayed on Wekan because of the checklist support, but the faster speeds, nice API, and slick UI in vikunja landed me here… for now.

Dang, talk about flashbacks I didn’t expect. Nicely done!

Another screensaver I miss and would actually put on my machine if I could… Johnny Castaway.

I’ve been using “passwords” on nextcloud for a few years now. Minimal issues with the app, moving apps, and browser extensions. Not perfect, but hey it’s self hosted and reliable.

My personal advice, secure it down to only permitting what needs it, regardless of your trust to the network.

Treat each device as if they’ve been compromised and the attacker on the compromised device is now trying to move laterally. Example scenario: had you blocked all devices except your laptop or phone to your server, your server wouldn’t have been hacked because someone went through a hacked cloud-connected HVAC panel.

I lock down everything and grant access only to devices that should have access. Then on top of that, I enable passwords and 2FA on everything as if it were public… Nothing I self host is public. It’s all behind my network firewall and router firewall, and can only be accessed externally by a VPN.

If you’re into self hosting, traccar is an option, which also has its own mobile app of course. Not the best thing ever but when it works, it’s nice. Connects to home assistant nicely, too.

Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I’m in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I’m in the mood for some melodic metal today, I’ll go there. Or EDM, I’ll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc…

Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I’ve done over these years, it’s 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system “wants” to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I’m kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that’s where I’ve gotten to the point of just using folder structures.

I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I’m actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I’ve yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I’m into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I’m in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn’t have folder structure view and even though it’s one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it’s never been added…

I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren’t introduced due to Emby also improving, I’ll finally jump over.

I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.

Plus 1 to Venstar. Got myself the T7900 and even though it offers internet access, I just blocked it at my router and connected it to the network, controlling it through home assistant. No need for third party access and whatnot with it since it’s completely local.

Also hard to relate. Got my Gentoo server running full auto updates every morning and then send an ntfy alert on success or failure. Haven’t seen a failed update in so long (other than the occasional package that had a bad build or something once in a while).

Back when I was fresh in the Gentoo and Linux world (Gentoo is where I started) and updating once a month, I can definitely say I ran into issues… dunno if it’s that big of an issue these days though.

“Texas Data Privacy and Security Act”… This is a thing? lol

Hmm I’ll have to check this later as I don’t remember ever running into that problem since my Xbox internal has been full for a while. But I also wonder if that applies to physical copies or not since all my series x games are physical. Unless Xbox does this automatically in the background without user intervention, then I may have not noticed

Weird, I have a regular old 2TB (or maybe it was 1?) western digital plugged into the USB on the back of my series x and it works fine, not sure I understand the need to spend a bunch on something like this. Edit: and before responding about speed… I haven’t noticed much, if any, difference in game performance from installing on the drive or external outside of the initial game loading (startup) time, so not sure if that’s the only benefit to using the expansion slot.

Raid 1 has saved my server a couple of times over from disaster. I make weekly cold backups, but I didn’t have to worry about it when my alert came in notifying me which drive went dead - just swap, rebuild, move along. So yeah I’d say it’s definitely worth it. Just don’t treat raid as a backup solution - and yes, continue to use an external cold storage backup solution as you mentioned. Fires, exploding power supplies, ransomware, etc don’t care if you’re using raid or not.

Actually, there are some apps and even phone level things that do try to call to custom DNS, ignoring all the phone settings, including those defined in the global settings. Termux nslookup is one I can think of at the top of my head that ignores the phone’s settings and instead tries to call to Google DNS. I’ve got DNS default blocked in a custom script for AFWall on my phone, excluding calling my custom DNS, and see the block frequently hit. Just now checking, I see 54 blocks on 8.8.8.8:53, 2 blocks on 1.1.1.1:53, and 16 on “other” port 53 (catch all block).

Think the best solution is either a router firewall setup if always on the wifi, or a phone firewall app that can act as a VPN and just default block everything, or something like that. If rooted, AFWall does wonders.

I’ve been using the fdroid syncthing-fork version for a long time now and haven’t had any issues at all… Doesn’t mean it’ll last forever but it’s been getting the job done for me even in its current state.

… And can’t remember my original reason to use the fork instead lol

Hmm that’s actually something I hadn’t thought about, but yeah it probably wouldn’t work for an offline mode… If the app is already open, maybe it would work, but I’m not 100% sure. In general, it does require internet to connect to your home assistant (my phone is setup with wireguard to VPN into mind so it’s not internet facing). So yeah unless it can be used during those random connection drops, maybe not a perfect option :(

My family uses a custom Todo list on home assistant. I’ve got a separate dashboard of items we can just click to add to the grocery list, and then when shopping, checking them will move them out of the way. Very convenient, quick, and shared. So if you use HA, it might be good option, especially since you’re wanting something simpler (I was in the same boat)